The Real Story: A Column
If you only read the headlines this week, you’d think Oregon just won a war against Portland General Electric (PGE) and Data Centers. “Oregon approves PGE’s 29.7% rate hike for data centers under landmark law,” reported OPB. “Regulators approve PGE’s 29% rate increase for Oregon data centers,” said KPTV. Oregon CUB called it a “big win for Oregon households.” Climate Solutions’ Nora Apter went further, calling it a “historic, precedent-setting win” for the state. Governor Kotek has been touting it on the campaign trail as proof her administration is finally making the state’s biggest power users pay their fair share.
All of that is technically true. None of it is the whole story.
What actually happened – The Real Story
On July 7, the Oregon Public Utility Commission approved a new rate structure requiring data centers on Portland General Electric’s system to pay 29% more, while residential customers see a 1.3% decrease, commercial customers 2.1%, and other industrial users 1.4%. The new rates took effect July 8. It’s the product of last year’s POWER Act and months of regulatory work, and it does represent a real, structural change: for the first time, PGE’s biggest customers have a dedicated rate class, minimum demand charges, and a requirement to cover 100% of the infrastructure built specifically to serve them.
That’s progress. It’s also a lot less than the headlines suggest.
Do the math with me
Start with what residents actually felt this year. In April, PGE raised residential rates 5% — about $8 more a month for the average household. That happened first, on its own regulatory track, mostly tied to fuel costs, storm recovery, and grid investment. Then in July, as a result of this recent action, residents got back 1.3%, or roughly $2 a month. Net position for the average Portland-area household since spring: still paying more than they were in January, not less. The “win” doesn’t undo the hit; it gives back about a quarter of it.
Now look at who actually drove the need for all this new infrastructure in the first place. In a letter PGE’s own CEO, Maria Pope, sent to Senator Wyden, she disclosed that over the past five years, residential electricity deliveries on PGE’s system grew by 6.4%. Industrial deliveries, the category that includes data centers and semiconductor manufacturing, grew 34.7%. That’s better than a five-to-one gap. And according to Oregon’s Citizens’ Utility Board, before this rate change, data centers were paying around 8 cents per kilowatt-hour, while households were paying close to 20 cents, less than half, for the class that caused most of the new demand.
Here’s the number nobody’s published: after the 29% increase, what’s the actual effective rate data centers are paying now, compared to that 20-cent residential benchmark? PGE hasn’t said. The OPUC’s order doesn’t say. A 29% increase off an artificially low base doesn’t tell you whether the gap closed, narrowed, or simply got less embarrassing. Until PGE or the commission publishes that comparison, “data centers now pay their fair share” is a claim taken on faith, not shown in the math.
And it’s worth saying plainly: Oregon’s population isn’t growing the way this “growth helps everyone” framing implies. IT IS NOT PEOPLE DRIVING OUR POWER GRID COSTS – IT IS DATA CENTERS AND INDUSTRY!
Portland’s population has dropped from about 653,000 in the 2020 Census to roughly 630,000 today, a nearly 3.5% decline. Multnomah County lost residents for three straight years before a recent modest uptick. Meanwhile, PGE says it spent $210 million just in Hillsboro on data-center-driven grid infrastructure. The system’s fixed costs aren’t being spread among more neighbors. They’re being spread across roughly the same number of households, while a small number of enormous, capital-intensive facilities, which don’t vote and enjoy Enterprise Zone property tax abatements on top of it, account for nearly all the new load.
One more asterisk worth knowing: this order only applies to PGE. Pacific Power customers are still waiting on a comparable decision, expected sometime around November. So even calling this “Oregon’s data center reckoning” overstates it — it’s one utility’s customers, for now.
Food for thought
None of what follows is an accusation. It’s the kind of thing a careful reader deserves to know exists, without me telling you what to make of it. These thought-provoking tidbits were researched and pulled from the web.
- Did you know that BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is PGE’s largest single shareholder, holding somewhere around 13-15% of the company?
- Did you know that BlackRock’s infrastructure investing arm, separate from its index funds, led a consortium that bought 100% of Aligned Data Centers, which has facilities in Hillsboro (OR), one of the country’s largest data center platforms, in a deal valued around $40 billion, and also holds a major stake in CyrusOne, another top-tier data center operator?
- Did you know that a sitting PGE board member, John O’Leary, chairs the board of Greenlane, a $650+ million clean-infrastructure joint venture whose partners include BlackRock’s Climate Infrastructure fund?
- Did you know that PGE board member Renée James, founder of a Portland semiconductor company that was recently sold to Softbank, currently co-chairs the Oregon Prosperity Council, an economic development body that Governor Kotek created this year?
- Did you know that current OPUC Commissioner Karin Power served as Governor Kotek’s Natural Resources and Climate Advisor immediately before her appointment to the commission, the same commission that later approved the rate structure implementing the administration’s signature energy law?
- Did you know that OPUC Chair Letha Tawney was a founding principal of the Clean Energy Buyers Alliance before joining the commission, a trade group whose members include Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, the exact companies building the data centers now regulated under Schedule 96?
Make of all that what you will. None of it is illegal. None of it is even unusual; this is a small industry, and small industries produce small worlds. But when the same names keep showing up on both sides of a negotiating table, and when the people announcing a “win” for ratepayers have professional and financial threads running through the very entities that win alongside them, a reader is entitled to raise an eyebrow before applauding.
The real story
Oregon took a real step. Data centers will pay more than they used to, and that matters. But the framing- that Oregon fought and won a battle against unchecked AI power demand- asks you to forget that Portland is shrinking while data-center demand is exploding, that the residential math still nets negative for the year, that nobody has shown the actual cents-per-kilowatt-hour comparison that would prove parity was reached, and that this decision covers exactly one of the state’s two major utilities.
Much ado. Not enough. And a lot of familiar names still standing in the room when the applause dies down.
Governor Tina Kotek may want to go on a Victory tour over this week’s headlines. But the reality is not all the facts have been published, and our own rate modeling suggests data centers are still paying far less per kW than residents; much less. That industry is causing the grid issues, and we are still paying for that. Until that changes, until there is a true leveling of the scales and the people of Oregon are represented in an equitable way, meaning Data Centers must pay as much or more than we do, there can be no victory, and there can be no rest on this issue.
Additional Reading-
- OPB, “Oregon approves PGE’s 29.7% rate hike for data centers under landmark law” — backs the headline event and the 29.7%/1.3% figures.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/07/07/oregon-data-center-general-electric-rate-hikes/ - Oregon CUB, “Regulators Set New Rules for How PGE Charges Data Centers for Electricity” — backs the 8-cents-vs-20-cents claim and the $210 million Hillsboro figure. This is the single most load-bearing citation in the piece since it’s the source of your central rate-disparity number.
https://oregoncub.org/news/water-wastewater/regulators-set-new-rules-for-how-pge-charges-data-centers-for-electricity/3274/ - KGW, “PGE rate increase, data centers, power cost, demand growth” — backs the Maria Pope/Sen. Wyden letter and the 34.7%-vs-6.4% growth-rate gap, the second-most load-bearing number in the piece.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/pge-rate-increase-data-centers-power-cost-demand-growth/283-399b079b-cbf5-41cf-8190-4c5f204d2d90 - Bloomberg, “BlackRock’s GIP, Abu Dhabi’s MGX Buy Aligned Data Centers in $40 Billion AI Bet” — backs the Aligned Data Centers/BlackRock ownership claim. Note: this is the piece I’d use instead of claiming a Hillsboro-specific facility — it supports the ownership fact cleanly without the unverified location detail.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-15/blackrock-s-gip-buys-aligned-data-centers-in-40-billion-ai-bet - Daimler Truck North America, “Introducing Greenlane” — backs the O’Leary/BlackRock joint venture claim directly from one of the venture’s own founding partners.
https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/news-stories/2023/introducing-greenlane-daimler-truck-north-america-nextera-energy-resources-and-blackrock-forge-ahead-with-public-charging-infrastructure-joint-venture
